So my oncologist just told me that he could treat me this time BUT when it came back he could not. I am sitting there in a small room with my husband and the doctor and the room feels like it is getting smaller. Did this doctor just tell me that basically a recurrence was a given and it would kill me?
I was only 35 years old my youngest child just turned 3 and my oldest was just 6. Was this some cruel cosmic joke? Did I really do something so bad that this is it? Did I take advantage of the “girls” and now they were paying me back?
All these things and so much more were swirling in my head, the walls felt like they were closing in, and the doctor is still talking! It was a good thing I brought someone with me to help write the important things down. The doctor told me that I would need to have another surgery to remove some lymph nodes to make sure that it has not spread and to place a medi-port under the skin near my collar bone. The medi-port would be used for future iv access. Chemotherapy is very hard on your veins and the port is a necessary thing to have.
He said that the initial treatment of chemotherapy cannot start until my next surgery and port placement. After that because I am under 40 and a triple negative breast cancer patient he was going to do very intense therapy on me. Great, another bad fact of being triple negative, my chemotherapy was going to be more frequent than others. The majority of breast cancer is treated with chemotherapy every three weeks, which is one week of feeling totally crappy, one week of feeling a little crappy and the third week feeling only a teeny bit crappy. With my chemotherapy it was going to be what is called dose dense chemotherapy. The main difference is that I got to get mine every two weeks which never gave me the third week of teeny bit crappy.
So the last part of my meeting was when I was hearing the survival rates of my cancer. I do not know if all doctors tell you this or really want to talk about it but I had done my research I wanted to hear it from him. In hindsight not my brightest move the survival rate for triple negative is lower than for other types of breast cancer. He would not tell me the survival rate or discuss it until the lymphnodes came back.